Agriculture in the Twenty-First Century

Detailed chapter description

Agriculture remains the largest spatial system of the contemporary economy of Mithila, Vajji and Anga even where its share of measured income has fallen. Fields, orchards, ponds, wetlands, livestock, irrigation channels, farm roads, wholesale markets and seasonal labour networks organize rural life and connect villages to towns. The twenty-first-century agricultural question is therefore not whether the region is becoming ‘less agricultural’ in a simple sense, but how farming is being recomposed under small holdings, migration, mechanisation, rising input costs, changing diets, expanding roads and markets, and recurrent climate shocks. A household may cultivate rice and wheat, lease additional land, sell milk, send a member to Delhi or the Gulf, hire a combine, and market vegetables through a trader. Such a household is simultaneously agricultural, migrant, service-using and market-dependent. The regional frame requires the same caution established in Chapter 117. Mithila, Vajji and Anga are historical-cultural regions rather than current statistical units. Agriculture must be reconstructed from district, block, crop, irrigation, livestock and market evidence rather than from a fabricated single regional total. Bihar’s official agricultural statistics provide the main Indian baseline; Nepal’s agricultural statistics are needed for the Madhesh side of the transborder economy. The Fourth Agriculture Roadmap of Bihar, launched for 2023–28, places sustainability, soil health, water conservation, climate resilience, organic inputs, horticulture and allied activities within a single policy framework. This chapter uses that framework critically: policy targets show intended direction, while farm structure and risk determine what is feasible on the ground.